


Did Most Grievous Torment

by lonerofthepack



Series: To Fall Next Upon Salem, and So Go On [5]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Folks there's nothing nice about this one, Isolation, M/M, Rape/Non-con - Freeform, Torture, explicit violence, positional asphyxiation, weird format
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:40:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23599984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonerofthepack/pseuds/lonerofthepack
Summary: Imperius can be fought.With enough willpower to press back against mind-numbing warmth and relaxation, with a tenacious sort of personality, it can be tossed off with little effect.Petrificus totalus offers no such seductive relief.Percival Graves can press through Imperious. In the face of destruction incarnate, he has the same spiteful, teeth-baring, duty-bound tenacity of a dog chewing through its leash to set itself on a bear in its master’s defense.
Relationships: Original Percival Graves/Gellert Grindelwald, pre Original Percival Graves/Newt Scamander
Series: To Fall Next Upon Salem, and So Go On [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1340785
Comments: 2
Kudos: 67





	Did Most Grievous Torment

**Author's Note:**

> Folks, this isn't a very nice fic. There's no comfort to be found here, and you don't need to read this to understand any of the other fics in the series. This is pure Percival whump.

Imperius can be fought. 

With enough willpower to press back against mind-numbing warmth and relaxation, with a tenacious sort of personality, it can be tossed off with little effect. 

That’s a process that becomes harder, the longer one exists in darkness, in cold and pain and hunger, when warmth and safety and sleep are in short supply…. but once one has the trick, recognizes the tickle of someone else easing up one’s strings, it's just a matter of determination. 

Imperious offers great efficacy--it’s unforgivable for a reason, to steal someone’s body while they’re unaware, and leave them to wake in whatever mess one might steal another’s body to enact, is a violation made worse by the slow-drip delay of remembering. It is unforgivable, because done correctly, the victim remembers nothing, wakes as if from a lovely sleep. 

Until one day, they do. Remember.

Imperius can be cast so that there is no warmth, can be cast so that the sufferer views their forced actions at a distance and suffers twice the remembering upon release. It isn’t nearly so effective for manipulation that way, offers no true marionette, but it is perfectly adequate for coercion — a stick puppet is not so flexible, but it will illustrate a simple story if the teller is skilled enough.

The relaxation is integral to the curse, though — and it is that which can be fought. 

Petrificus totalus offers no such seductive relief. 

There is no relaxation to be had, when one's own body tightens into a cage. When injuries scream against the pressure of the body locking in place and limbs ache for days after, even from just a short stint. There is nothing to fight except pain, no way to take back control without overpowering the spell through sheer brute force — it is not an assault on the mind, but a siege of the body, and it does not even permit its victims to beg.

(Percival Graves can press through Imperious--the thread of suspicion is familiar and the pain of leaning away from obedience comforting amidst creeping warmth and swamping lassitude. He can follow it back to clear-headedness, and clamps his teeth into the meat of his cheek to endure the constant gnawing pressure to obey. In the face of destruction incarnate, he has the same spiteful, teeth-baring, duty-bound tenacity of a dog chewing through its leash to set itself on a bear in its master’s defense.)

(He had sworn loyalty, integrity, and service to the magical public. He had sworn his determination to justice, to the protection of his world.)

(He bleeds the same color as that hypothetical dog.)

Petrificus does not permit screaming, either--a silver lining to every hurricane, to some minds. A grave disappointment to others.

(He proves his vows in silence. He proves them with the stink of blood in his mouth and the slow terrible snap of bone echoing in his ears and looping like no-maj electricity in his blood, burning itself out when he passed out only to light itself again as he woke.)

(Percival Graves does not lack for determination.)

Imperius offers little danger, of itself. Its control is exerted subtly — a veil over the parts of a person that might protest, worry eased away like a warm bath, that the puppet never feared the lift of it’s strings. There is no need to bind a doll.

Endurance of a pain that— in different circumstances— might have been self-inflicted, is shockingly difficult. It is one of the facts of Petrificus that make it dangerous; it appears little worse than voluntary stillness.

Petrificus is an entirely different mechanism than Imperius.

It paralyses, holds fast. 

For life, some movement is always necessary.

(It is impossible to tell the time in a room left permanently dark, and thus, impossible to tell how long his breaths grow shallower and shallower, his diaphragm laboring against the position and the heave of his lungs. How long his thoughts took to slip from control, from the weighing of options and planning, to go fuzzy and frightened, how long they twisted around themselves. How long until even his mind went still.)

(When he slumps, the first full breath for hours has blue spots ringing bright against the back of his eyelids. He lays still, stares into the black, and breathes. If every breath is an act of defiance, he will continue to breathe.)

  
  
  


Gellert attempts to corral his prisoner with Imperius for three days. Graves is of an old family, is handsome and strong, is magically powerful. Percival Graves is a contemporary of sorts, trained by Americans and self-taught in many qualities that Gellert would consider the purview of a more civilized country, but ultimately— Percival Graves is a shining beacon of proof, that wizards, powerful, educated wizards, are the rightful inheritors of the earth. Gellert is reluctant to destroy such a thing.

Percival Graves throws off Imperius, faster every time, and whirls to attack the moment he’s free. 

He slams down occlumency shields like steel traps that seem only to thicken with every push against it that Gellert offers. 

Imperius fails. If unbound, Percival Graves attacks. 

If hurt, he fights--if restrained to be hurt, he goes dangerously still with steel behind his eyes, just until he has whittled the bindings down to nothing, in order to attack again. Pain nor sweet promises seem to hold the power to make him move, make him break his silence.

A full week of this, and Gellert has no more information from this source than he had when he had started. His guest is a study of interesting colors in the meager light Gellert has brought, purple ranges to yellow, with streaks of rust red that show so nicely against milk pale skin.

Thwarted in every attempt to escape or overcome Gellert, Graves spits the blood in his mouth on the floor in defiance and braces to attack or resist again, determined to give no satisfaction.

Thwarted at every attempt to pry secrets from that stubborn brain, Gellert finds the frustration amusing. He has always been a bit odd that way.

“Well, my dear, if you insist,” Gellert drawls. “Allow me to assist.” 

And then Gellert goes away. He has more important things to do than to wait for Percival Graves to destroy himself. 

(And Percival Graves doesn’t move a muscle. For longer than his shaky sense of time allows him to track--for longer than his weakened body allows him to remain aware, as he wavers between waking and unconsciousness.

He wakes and fades a dozen times before his limbs finally slump to a watery uselessness against the stone. Finally, he is allowed to shake and shake and shake, lungs heaving like a bellows in trying to stop choking whines from crawling up his throat into the dark.)

Graves can barely stand the next time Grindelwald appears, hours or weeks or minutes later, and he needs the walls of his prison for support in doing so. 

A shattered knee takes care of that formality in short order--the agony of it shocks a muffled shout out of him, and he’s hard-pressed to mount a physical resistance when icy cold fingers wind into his hair to yank his gaze up.

But mental shields only require focus, and determination.

Gellert tosses him down again in disgust, and kicks the knee he destroyed for good measure just to enjoy the battered gasp that earns, and the quivering curl of a body trying to protect itself. 

“This could be easy, you know.”

He goes, and leaves decades, seconds, geological ages of stillness.

Percival Graves doesn’t stand when Gellert returns; he cannot attack either. But his mouth stays closed and the steel walls behind eyes made black by so little light are slick and shiny and many feet thick.

Frustration is less amusing in the second week. Gellert stares into his eyes as the delicate bones of one hand and then the other crack under the tap-tap-tap of a very old wand.

He doesn’t scream, he barely breathes. His jaw must ache, it is clenched so tightly. Gellert watches shock shrink his pupils, and smiles.

Months of stillness. Minutes like ambulations around the heliosphere. Seconds that stretch like treacle, of stillness so still he can’t remember if he’s breathing. Until, of course, he  _ can _ remember, because his lungs are burning. 

Petrificus is dangerous in ways that Imperius is not. 

The third week is a new game, and Gellert earns back Percival Graves’ voice — he groans and moans and whimpers like any man, fucked hard enough. And he shivers helplessly to be touched, to be whispered to in the voices of his beloved aurors, after he’s been fucked long enough.

He still  _ says _ nothing, and Legilimency slides like oil on the steel of his shields. Gellert smiles, and leaves him to stillness, and to shadows.

“It is a shame, you know,” Gellert tells him, the fourth week, winding the shadows into the shape of grasping fingers and greedy palms. Percival Graves can come from being fucked alone, which is its own amusement, but he can be made to scream-- _ finally _ \-- with simulacra of human hands stroking gentleness over the bruises on his skin and offering only thick pitiless agony deep inside. “They don’t even realize. Poor Percy, does no one love you?”

He chokes, and Gellert smiles. In the fifth week, he says: “I could make them, you know.”

He whines — whether from Gellert’s words or the twist of too-much, too-soon, too-dry, inside him— or maybe it was the lie of the shadow caressing cheeks and throat and the tremble-flinch of his thighs…

It doesn’t much matter. Gellert hardly needs Percival Graves any longer. He’s found the boy, who will find the Child. He has cleared the American government of any who would oppose him, and the rest are fooled. Let him choke and whine and twist on whisps of magic, or be as still and silent as a creature already dead.

  
The magizoologist ruins things--well, Albus has always gravitated towards chaos, and the magizoologist delivers just that. It isn’t truly fair to blame it on him. Picquery is the sword that slashes his work to bits, but she is not nearly so interesting as the storm in a teal coat that bestirred her.

Fair or not, Gellert will see Newton Scamander courted to his side, or destroyed, for the ruination of his work.

Well, he learns later — he feels Petrificus fizzle away in the first moments of defeat, and he laughs and laughs when they ask him: Where. When. How. Where. And he’s learned a little something from their precious Director, letting steel snap shut behind his eyes.

No. Neither Scamander nor Picquery have managed to ruin everything, have they.

He laughs, and laughs, and laughs.


End file.
